The Start of the First Day

Things really started for us today. We got all of the goods we needed to take to distribute today ready and packed up. Suzette spent the evening counting sorting and dividing. The list included 177 pairs of shoes, 140 pants, 83 shirts, 140 toothbrushes and toothpaste, 153 balls of all sorts, 20 hand puppets and a few other assorted gifts. All we were missing was a partridge in a pear tree. It's really a phenomenal collection of stuff everyone sent to help these children. To say thanks for all of your help barely begins to scratch the surface of the impact everyone has had on a group of people so few of us have actually met. If you had the opportunity to meet them, you would wish you had done more, but more about that later.

When we left for the day, a few things struck me as first impressions. First, we're really high up. About 9,400 feet at the hotel, above 10,000 feet at the children's refuge. That's nearly 2 miles. Even with altitude sickness medicine, you're head feels a little funky and your sinuses hurt. The second thing I noted was that Quito is the poor capital of a poor country. Even the nice parts of town look pretty rough around the edges in comparison to our standards. The third is that taxi cab drivers are the same the world over. Washington, our driver, is a great guy, but wow! it is an adventure riding with him. It doesn't help that the roads are worse than anything even in Michigan. It's sort of funny that as he parks, he backs the cab into the curb to keep it from rolling down the hill.

Our day began with meeting with people who run the foundation who oversee the several missions for the impoverished children in Quito. These are the people who work to provide for the buildings (even as we have helped provide funding) and get our money to the places it is supposed to go. A lot of money comes from agencies in Spain, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, with volunteers occasionally coming from some of those countries, but it was clear that no one has the connection to this foundation or the children that St. Mark has. We are the ones who provide ongoing love and support on a regular basis. We also learned of a new project starting in the Santo Domingo region of Ecuador to provide clean water to a group of people who are living on a dump. More on that later.